By Vikas Datta

Title: Hands: What We Do with Them and Why; Author: Darian Leader; Publisher: Penguin Random House UK; Pages: 128; Price: Rs 499

If you think the current trend of people, publicly and privately, paying ferocious attention to their smartphones or other hand-held devices and furiously typing, clicking or scrolling away is technology making a travesty of human nature, you may well be wrong. For these habits may represent its crucial parts latest preoccupation.

While the radical effect of the internet, the smartphone and the PC is said to be on who we are and how we relate to each other and whatever we make of the changes, psychoanalyst Darian Leader notes that experts stress that these are changes which have made the world a different place and the digital era is incontestably new.

But what if we were to see this chapter in human history through a slightly different lens? What if, rather than focusing on the new promises or discontents of contemporary civilisation, we see todays changes as first and foremost changes in what human beings do with their hands? he poses.

For while the digital age may have transformed many aspects of our experience, but its most obvious yet neglected feature is that it allows people to keep their hands busy in a variety of unprecedented ways.

Leader, in this slim but more than a handful of a book, contends that the body part that most defines us humans is not our advanced brain but rather our restless upper pair of limbs. Thus, a considerable amount of our history and habits can be related to what we can do or cannot do with our hands and why we must keep them busy.

This, he says, brings us to examine the reasons for this strange necessity to know why idle hands are deemed dangerous, how their roles for infants changes as they grow, what links hands to the mouth, and what happens when we are restrained.

The anxious, irritable and even desperate states we might then experience show that keeping the hands busy is not a matter of whimsy or leisure, but touches on something at the heart of what our existence embodies.

And to ascertain this something, Leader goes on to draw from popular culture (especially films, mostly horror and science fiction but also classics like Dr Zhivago), language, religion, social and art history, psychoanalysis, modern technology, clinical research, the pathology of violence and more to find the what, why, and how.

In this process, we come to know why zombies and monsters (like Frankenstein) are shown walking with outstretched arms, why newborns grip an adult finger so tightly that they can dangle unsupported from it, the reason for prayers beads in various religions (Leader misses out Hinduism), why nicotine patches may not help smokers, the constant preoccupation (for some of us) with texting, tapping and scrolling and our behaviour on public transport.

And as Leader is a founding member of the Centre for Freudian Research and Analysis, people will expect sex to figure somewhere and they will not be wrong or fully right. For he only tackles one aspect, which involves the hand.

He recalls when friends and others asked him what he was working on during the preparation of this book, my reply that it was to be an essay about hands produced the almost invariable response, Oh! A book about masturbation!'. He dryly notes that the association appeared to be so intractable that it seemed foolish not to at least devote a chapter to this.

His observations on hands and their motivations and manifestations break new ground and it will suffice to say that you will never look at fairy tales, from those of the Grimm Brothers to Arabian Nights to J.R.R. Tolkien, the same way again.

His chapter on violence seems a bit out of place, but Leader brings his argument a full circle as he closes on the compulsive use of technological devices what we (and their makers) must know about them.

More of a long essay than a book, it brings to fore to the issue that, despite all our technical prowess, we are still to plumb the mysteries of our mind and body, which can be more complex than anything we invent. (IANS)

Related

Follow this link:
Book Review: A handy guide to human behavior - India New England

Autonomous tech start-ups have offered a number of waysall of which they believe to be the most appropriate and correctto approach the development of self-driving cars. A new company out of the United Kingdom, FiveAI, has a fresh take, though: CCTV cameras.

What to do when you get rear-ended: remain calm and exchange information. What not to do:

The company has raised about $31 million, and its hoping to deploy autonomous cars on the streets of London by 2019, according to Wired UK. Like most developers in the field, FiveAI is going to use LiDAR and other sensors to make their cars function appropriately, but it has to figure out how to handle a similar issue that makes perfecting the technology difficult: what to do with big, dumb humans.

Theres a big difference in human behavior and the human behaviors in one city vary to the next city, Stan Boland, FiveAIs CEO, told Wired.

So, Boland and his firm want to lean on Londons existing, insanely expansive CCTV camera system.

Heres more from Wired:

A lot of London, for example, does have CCTV camera footage which we can use. By transforming CCTV footage to a birds-eye view, using computer simulations, Boland says it will be possible to build models of what happens at street junctions.

The self-driving car race is going to be a heated bloodbath thats going to cost billions in failed investments, and who knows where FiveAi is going to come out in the end. Its still early! But relying on an endless stream of CCTV footage is novel, so FiveAI at least has that going for it.

Read this article:
This Start-Up Wants To Use CCTV Footage To Develop Self-Driving Car Technology - Jalopnik

Wild dogs in Botswana are an endangered species, and they offer us a rare window into undomesticated dog behavior. Researchers followed five packs of them for a year, recording their social interactions.

Neil Jordan

When they greet each other, wild African dogs often jump around, bark, and touch each other playfully. This is called a "rally."

Andrew King

One of the major reasons for dog rallies is to gather up pack members and start on a new hunting mission. Researchers found that the dogs were "voting" on whether to hunt again by making a sneezing noise.

Andrew King

The more "sneezes" the researchers recorded, the more likely it was that the pack would move along and start hunting. If a pack leader initiated the rally, fewer sneezes were needed to get started.

Andrew King

Though humans like to think of themselves as the only creatures on Earth who vote on what to do, they aren't. Many social animals engage in consensus-seeking behavior, from meerkats to honeybees to Capuchin monkeys. In these species and more, members of the group weigh in about what their next move should be.

Now, a new study of African wild dogs in Botswana adds another animal to the voting pool. It turns out that these endangered, undomesticated dogs "vote" on whether to start hunting by making noises that sound just like sneezes.

Neil Jordan, a fellow at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, worked with a team to follow five packs of these dogs for roughly 11 months, observing their behavior and recording the sounds they made. Based on previous research, he and his colleagues were fairly certain that the dogs had to reach a consensus before setting out on a collective hunt. The scientists already knew that the dogs had a very specific social pattern, called a "rally," wherein the pack would come together and boisterously greet each other. Writing in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Jordan and his team describe how they figured out that rallies were generally initiated by one dog, who "rose from rest in the distinctive initiation posture: head lowered, mouth open, and ears folded back."

After witnessing several rallies, the researchers noticed something strange. They started hearing patterns of sneezes. Jordan said in a release that they "noticed the dogs were sneezing while preparing to go." So the researchers went over recordings of 68 rallies and "couldn't quite believe it when our analyses confirmed our suspicions... The more sneezes that occurred, the more likely it was that the pack moved off and started hunting. The sneeze acts like a type of voting system."

You can hear some sneeze votes in this video.

Even more interesting, however, is that dog democracy is as imperfect as the human version. When a dominant male or female dog called the rally, fewer sneezes were needed to start the hunt. Study co-author Reena Walker added, "If the dominant pair were not engaged, more sneezes were neededapproximately 10before the pack would move off." In other words, some votes count more than others.

Walker told The New York Times that the noise they called "sneezes" isn't really like a human sneeze. There's no inhalation, just an "audible, rapid forced exhalation through the nose." We also aren't sure that this noise is involuntary, like a sneeze, or more like a person making a grunt of assent. What is certain is that the more of these sounds you hear during a dog vote, the more likely they are to move along to do some dog business together.

Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 2017. DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2017.0347 (About DOIs).

Listing image by Andrew King

Visit link:
Wild dogs in Africa engage in unmistakable voting behavior - Ars Technica

High up on a bookcase in Dr. Philip Thomass office at Paine College is a row of binders with one at one end marked 1977 and others that go on up from there. After 41 years at Paine, the founder of its sociology program is retiring but he is planning for a legacy to leave behind.

Thomas will retire as a professor of sociology and likely be named faculty emeritus in coming months, said Helene Carter, assistant vice president for institutional advancement at Paine. He will also rotate off Paines board of trustees, where he served on the search committee that brought in new President Jerry Hardee. But he will miss the classroom and the students, Thomas said.

I have already taught two generations, he said. A lot of people come and tell me, Dr. Thomas, you taught my mother.^ He jokes that he is retiring before he can teach a third generation so that no one will come up to him and say, Dr. Thomas, you taught my grandmother.

Part of it is to spend more time with family.

I have grandchildren and I am trying to spend some time with them, Thomas said. The grandchildren are in Boston and he just spent a week up there with them.

If I am teaching I wont be able to do that, he said.

He came to Paine before he finished his doctorate at Emory University when he needed to get a teaching job. He applied to every college in Georgia, and Paine was the first to respond. When he got there in 1976, he liked the beautiful small campus and was impressed by his faculty colleagues.

They were people who got their degrees from Yale University and Cornell University and Syracuse University, they were committed people, Thomas said. They were my role models so when I got to be friends with them, that made me stay here.

He also liked the man who hired him, then-President Julius Scott.

I worked very well with him, thats why I stayed here, Thomas said.

His field, sociology, is the study of human behavior but is different from similar fields, he said.

Sociology focuses primarily on the groups, psychology focuses on the individual and the mind, Thomas said. Here we are looking at the influence of the environment on the person.

That field, too, has changed over the course of his career.

Many fields have come out of sociology, Thomas said. Criminology is a separate field now.

In fact, there is a movement now in medicine to focus more on some of those same factors in looking at population health and sociology has always been well-positioned to do that, he said.

A lot of people go into the medically-related fields from sociology, Thomas said. A lot of them go for a (master of public health). The University of Georgia and the University of South Carolina, they are always looking for our students from the sociology department. We are proud of that.

Even though Paine is in the midst of a lawsuit with its accrediting body and technically on probation for not meeting certain financial standards, he sees things working out for the future.

We hope the situation will turn around, Thomas said. We need a person who is able to recruit students.

Hardee has already said that will be one of his major initiatives and Thomas sent him a note recently urging him to take a broader approach at attracting new students, including more Hispanics.

He has always been concerned about students in need and is starting an endowment at Paine to help them, particularly those with good grades who are interested in sociology. At his retirement party Sept. 23, Thomas is asking in lieu of gifts that people donate to this endowment. And he will be doing his part as well.

Our family will match whatever they contribute, Thomas said.

Reach Tom Corwin at (706) 823-3213

or tom.corwin@augustachronicle.com.

The rest is here:
Sociology professor retiring after 41 years at Paine - The Augusta Chronicle

by: Brianna Chambers, Cox Media Group National Content DeskUpdated: Sep 3, 2017 - 8:33 PM

Charlottes Web,Stellaluna andThe Ugly Duckling are among the innumerable childrens books written to teach kids lessons through situations and images involving animals.

But a new study says books that feature humans learning lessons, instead of animal characters, stick with children more and allow for more insight into application of values and morals.

>> Read more trending news

The study, conducted by researchers at the University of Torontos Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE) and published in the journal Developmental Science,found that children who read a book with human characters were more affected than those who read a book with animal characters.

In an experiment, nearly 100 children between the ages of 4 and 6 were read one of three books:Little Raccoon Learns to Shareby Mary Packard, which illustrates a fictional raccoon who learns that sharing makes one feel good and proves beneficial to all involved in the action; a version of the story in which the animal illustrations were replaced with human characters; and a control book about seeds.

The experiment found that children who were read the book with the human characters were more willing to share later in the day than those who were read the book with animal characters. Andthere was no difference in generosity between children who read the book with anthropomorphized animal characters and the control book; both groups showed a decrease in sharing behavior, the researchers found.

Reading a book about sharing had an immediate effect on childrens pro-social behavior, according to the study. However, the type of story characters significantly affected whether children became more or less inclined to behave pro-socially. After hearing the story containing real human characters, young children became more generous. In contrast, after hearing the same story but with anthropomorphized animals or a control story, children became more selfish.

A growing body of research has shown that young children more readily apply what theyve learned from stories that are realistic ... (but) this is the first time we found something similar for social behaviors, said Patricia Ganea, who led the study, according to The Guardian. The finding is surprising given that many stories for young children have human-like animals.

Read more atThe Guardianand read the study here.

2017 Cox Media Group.

View original post here:
Children's books with humans, not animals more effective, study says - KIRO Seattle

Society is comprised of various individuals with a unique set of hopes, dreams and emotions. Attempting to understand each person's motives is a complexing feat to say the least. Author Duane Shoebridge tackles the challenge head-on and helps readers decipher why we do the things we do in his new book, "Getting Around the Humans: Figuring Out Why People Do What They Do."

"Getting Around the Humans" educates readers on how to discern the root of human behavior. Shoebridge identifies three primary desires - wealth, riches and honor - and shares how these wants are translated into action and help shape personality. He shows how to identity these concepts and how to interact with others who prioritize such desires differently. Featuring a Biblical perspective, "Getting Around the Humans" sheds light on why we do what we do.

"Each human being has a distinctive combination of aspirations, wants and hopes that they can only fully comprehend," Shoebridge said. "Getting Around the Human teaches readers to recognize these desires - both in ourselves and others - and work with their strengths and weaknesses."

"Getting Around the Humans: Figuring Out Why People Do What They Do"By Duane ShoebridgeISBN: 9781512779493 (hardcover), 9781512779486 (softcover), 9781512779479 (e-book)Available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Westbow Press

About the authorDuane Shoebridge is a husband and a homeschool father of three. He has his bachelor's in psychology and Bible from Northwestern College. His passion has been in youth ministry since 1990. He has been working as a business information consultant and programmer for a business he started since 2010.

Review Copies & Interview Requests:LAVIDGE - PhoenixSaTara Williams480-998-2600 x 586swilliams(at)lavidge.com

General Inquiries:LAVIDGE - PhoenixJacquelyn Brazzale480-998-2600 x 569jbrazzale(at)lavidge.com

Original post:
New Book Examines the Core of Human Behavior - Broadway World

Behavioral health is rather specific, and technology-powered distant care is only cautiously developing in this realm. While providers recognize the need to employ technology for treating patients with anxiety, chronic stress, eating disorders, substance abuse, and other conditions, it is challenging to create a solution capable of effective intervention in human behavior that brings measurable and positive outcomes.

But there's more to this challenge. Behavioral disorders often go hand-in-hand with physical conditions. For example, a study initiated by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation revealed that patients with asthma are nearly 2.5 times more likely to develop depression. Another viewpoint published in JAMA states that diabetes patients are twice as likely to suffer from a major depressive disorder during their lifetime.

Accordingly, some patients have to simultaneously take care of their physical and behavioral conditions, which is a huge burden. Good news is, technology is here to back up patients' efforts in-between support group meetings and one-on-ones. We are talking about patient-generated health data (PGHD) and its processing through the health data analytics methods.

Why PGHD for Behavioral Health?

Behavior is a constantly changing aspect of identity, which gives hope to patients who are feeling helpless in controlling their anxiety, depression, eating disorders, or other problems. But to initiate a positive change in a patient's condition, providers need more data. EHR data is great as a foundation for a patient profile, but it isn't enough to show gradual progress in treatment and establish short-term goals for patients to achieve.

PGHD can help in supporting patients with behavioral disorders in their daily struggle. It includes subjective and objective data collected by a patient (or their family) using wearables or medical devices, and is usually shared with caregivers through mHealth apps.

Subjective Data

A patient's self-evaluation is critical to successful treatment and recovery, be it depression, eating disorder, substance abuse, or another behavioral health condition. While each condition might require additional data on patients' feelings and emotions, the general list of subjective items to report can include:

Additionally, some objective information can be turned subjective with advanced wearable technology. For example, Spire tracks breathing patterns and analyzes them to understand how an individual feels, even before someone can recognize their own emotional state.

By continuously defining and reporting emotions, both patients and providers can understand certain patterns of how well the patient dealt with anxiety last week and how helpful the support group is (looking at the overall mood after each session). Moreover, strong negative trends in subjective items can indicate that the patient is on the edge of relapse, and the provider would get an automated notification about the possible problem. In this case, the caregiver would be able to discuss the patient's problem and take necessary actions, such as scheduling an appointment.

Objective Data

From the behavioral health perspective, objective data is supportive to the subjective data, a physiological reflection of a patient's mental and emotional state. The following vitals can help a caregiver understand the full picture of a patient's progress and current health status:

The readings from smart trackers can be aggregated and sent to the provider's health data analytics system to analyze the results and match them with previous measurements. If the analysis reveals any negative trends (e.g., weight loss dynamics for a patient with anorexia or decrease in activity because of a reduced number of steps), an application will notify the care team about possible risks to a patient's health status (via emails or text messages).

PGHD Supports Patients

Mental health is about keeping people strong and resourceful in the face of challenges. But with anxiety or depression crawling inside their mind, food becoming an obsession, or substance addiction developing, individuals can't think straight and can't live their lives to the fullest.

While there are various ways to help patients recover from disorders, including support groups, medications, and one-on-ones with a psychologist or psychiatrist, most of these measures are short-term interventions. Patients, in their turn, need continuous support, and PGHD can enable it.

A patient will be able to see the summary of their progress via their mHealth app. They can track mood swings during the month, relate anxiety bursts to insomnia cases, or celebrate the weight gain trend (this can be especially motivating for patients with anorexia) -- all backed up with automated push notifications if there's anything to worry about.

Not pretending to be a full-blown substitute for therapy, PGHD serves as a bridge between care points. This way, both a patient and their provider will be informed of the individual's overall progress with ups and downs, streamlining the process of tracking achievements, recognizing plateaus and, ultimately, patient recovery.

Lola Koktysh is a healthcare industry analyst at ScienceSoft, an IT consulting company headquartered in McKinney, Texas, where she focuses on healthcare IT including the industry's challenges and technology solutions.

2017-09-02T16:00:00-0400

See the article here:
Will Behavioral Health Benefit from Patient-Generated Data? - MedPage Today

Ongoing advances in understanding the functional connections within the brain are producing exciting insights into how the brain circuits function together to support human behaviorand may lead to new discoveries in the development and treatment of psychiatric disorders, according to a review and update in the Harvard Review of Psychiatry.

Advanced neuroimaging techniques provide a new basis for studying circuit-level abnormalities in psychiatric disorders, according to the special perspectives article by Deanna M. Barch, PhD, of Washington University in St. Louis. She writes, "These advances have provided the basis for recent efforts to develop a more complex understanding of the function of brain circuits in health and of their relationship to behaviorproviding, in turn, a foundation for our understanding of how disruptions in such circuits contribute to the development of psychiatric disorders."

Functional Connectivity Data Point to New Understanding of Psychopathology

In recent years, large-scale research projects including the Human Connectome Project (HCP) have focused on defining and mapping the functional connections of the brain. The result is an extensive body of new evidence on functional connectivity and its relationship to human behavior.

In her article, Dr. Barch focuses on a technique called resting-state functional connectivity MRI (rsfcMRI), which measures how spontaneous fluctuations in blood oxygen level-dependent signals are coordinated across the brain. Analysis of rsfcMRI and other data in large numbers of subjects from the HCP will provide new insights into a wide range of psychiatric disorders, such as depression and anxiety, substance use, and cognitive impairment.

Recent studies have found that spontaneous activity from networks of regions across the brain are highly correlated even at rest (that is, when the person is not performing a specifically targeted task). This "resting state" activity may consume around 20 percent of the body's total energyeven though the brain is only two percent of total body mass, according to Dr. Barch. "Ongoing resting-state activity may provide a critical and rich source of disease-relate variability."

One key question is what constitutes the "regions" that make up the neural circuits of the brain. Recent rsfcMRI mapping studies have identified between 180 and 356 different brain regions, including many common regions that can be mapped across individuals. Future studies will look at whether these regions differ in shape, size, or location in people with psychiatric disordersand whether these differences contribute to changes in the formation and function of brain circuits.

Some brain networks identified by rsfcMRI may play important roles in the functions and processes commonly impaired in psychiatric disorders. These include networks involved in cognitive (thinking) function, attention to internal emotional states, and the "salience" of events in the environment. Many questions remain as to how these brain networks are related to behavior in general, and to psychiatric disorders in particular.

Some researchers are using HCP data to study behavioral factors relevant to psychiatric issues, including cognitive function, mood, emotions, and substance use/abuse. Other studies are looking for rsfcMRI patterns related to individual differences in depression or anxiety, and their connections to various brain networks.

Dr. Barch's research focuses on brain networks affecting the relationship between cognitive function and "psychotic-like" experiences. She notes that work on individual differences in functional connectivity in the HCP dataset is just getting startedthe full HCP dataset was made publicly available in the spring of 2017.

"The hope is that these analyses will shed new light on how behavior of many different forms is related to functional brain connectivity, ultimately providing a new window for understanding psychopathology," Dr. Barch writes. Continued studies of the relationships between brain circuitry and behavior might eventually lead to new therapeutic targets and new approaches to treatment monitoring and selection for patients with psychiatric disorders.

Explore further: Manipulating brain network to change cognitive functions: New breakthrough in neuroscience

More information: Deanna M. Barch. Resting-State Functional Connectivity in the Human Connectome Project, Harvard Review of Psychiatry (2017). DOI: 10.1097/HRP.0000000000000166

The rest is here:
New findings on brain functional connectivity may lend insights into mental disorders - Medical Xpress

It is no secret most robots will be far better at making products and goods thantheir human counterparts ever will be. According to Grabit, the companysline of robots is capable of working at 20 times the pace of anaverage human. These robots are designed to build pairs of Nike shoes. Flooding the market with the finished product may help to push the shoesaverage price down by quite a bit. It is one of those developments people will both love and hate at the same time.

Very few people consider how much work goes into the process of putting a pair of shoes together. The amount of labor required for this specific purpose should not be overlooked. The upper part of the shoe which sits on top of your foot is actually the most laborious task ofall to complete. It is not comprised of one single piece of material. Humans often have to put together a few dozen individual pieces in order to create this part of the shoe. Up until now, no robot hadbeen able to produceadequate results whenputting this part together.

Grabit claims that has now changed. The company has built a robot which is capable of fully assembling pairs of Nike shoesquickly. Considering how Nike, Inc. invested millions in this company, it is about time those efforts pay off. It is worth noting how the robots rely on static electricity known as electroadhesion to help manipulate objects in unique ways. This allows the robots to assemble every single part of a shoe with relative ease. It does so at 20 times the pace of a human worker, which is both amazing and terrifying.

So far, a few Nike facilities have been equipped with Grabit robots to fully test their performance over time. It is expected around 12 of these machines will be operating across both Mexico and China before December 31st of this year. Thiswould certainly allow Nike to shake up itsmanufacturing process quite a bit and bring it closer to itsmajor consumer market. If this trial were successful, it could mean positive things for the industrys negative association with child labor as well.

Automation is coming to the manufacturing sector. So far, no major companies have deployed such technology on any sizeable scale, though. Robotic arms have been the main area of focus for the time being, although other technologies are being considered as well. Entrusting robots with more meticulous work is a big gamble by Nike, but so far, the companysefforts are paying off. Only time will tell whether or not their gut feeling was the right one, though.

Grabits robots do not mimic human behavior. They use flat pads of electrodes which create an electrical field adhering to virtually any surface one can think of. This is very different from most robotic hand-oriented projects in the industry right now. It is more likehow one would expect robots to behave, rather than an imitation of human workforce. It does not appear the company faces any major competition right now, which makes them rather unique for the time being.

Moreover, Grabits robots can work together with human operators, which is another big selling point. The software decides how the various pieces shouldbe stacked, and lights up positions for the human partner to set things down. The system currently requiresone human employee to monitor one machine per shift, which should improve overall productivity by up to 2,000%. This is a very interesting development that shows that not all robots are designed to take human jobs.

See more here:
Grabit's Robots Produce Nike Shoes 20 Times Faster Than Humans Do - The Merkle

What do you need to build a self-driving car? Roboticists and computer scientists have generally settled on similar requirements. Your autonomous vehicle needs to know where the boundaries of the road are. It needs to be able to steer the car and hit the brakes. It needs to know the speed limit, be able to read street signs, and detect if a traffic light is red or green. It needs to be able to react quickly to unexpected objects in its path, and it gets extra points if it knows where it is on a map.

All of those skills are important and necessary. But by building from a list of technical requirements, researchers neglect the single most important part of real-world driving: our intuition. Using it to determine the motivations of those around us is something humans are so effortlessly good at that its hard to even notice were doing it, nonetheless program for it.

A self-driving car currently lacks the ability to look at a personwhether theyre walking, driving a car, or riding a bikeand know what theyre thinking. These instantaneous human judgments are vital to our safety when were drivingand to that of others on the road, too.

As the CTO and cofounder of Perceptive Automata, an autonomous-vehicle software company started by Harvard neuroscientists and computer scientists, I wanted to see how often humans make these kinds of subconscious calls on the road. I took a camera out to a calm intersection near my former lab at Harvard with no traffic signals. It is not by any stretch of the imagination as congested or difficult as an intersection in downtown Boston, let alone Manhattan or Mexico City. But in 30 seconds of video, it is still possible to count more than 45 instances of one person intuiting whats in the mind of another. These non-verbal, split-second intuitions could be that person is not going to yield, that person doesnt know Im here, or that person wouldnt jaywalk while walking a dog. Is that bicyclist going to turn left or stop? Is that pedestrian going to take advantage of their right-of-way and cross? These judgments happen instantaneously, just watch.

We have lots of empirical evidence that humans are incredibly good at intuiting the intentions of others. The Sally-Anne task is a classic psychology experiment. Subjectsusually childrenwatch a researcher acting out a scene with dolls. A doll named Sally hides a marble in a covered basket. Sally leaves the room. While Sally is gone, a second dollAnnesecretly moves the marble out of the basket and into a closed box. When the first doll comes back, children are asked where she will look for the marble. Its easy to say, Well, of course shell still look in the basket, as Sally couldnt have known that the marble had moved while she was gone. But that of course is hiding an immensely sophisticated model. Children have to know not only that Sally is aware of some things and not of others, but that her awareness only updates when she is able to pay attention to something. They also have to know that her mental state is persistent, even when she leaves the room and comes back. This task has been repeated many times in labs around the world, and is part of the standard toolkit researchers use to understand if somebodys social intuitions are intact.

The ability to predict the mental state of others is so innate that we even apply it to distinctly non-human objects. The Heider-Simel experiment shows how were prone to ascribe perceived intent even to simple geometric shapes. In this famous study, a film shows two triangles and a circle moving around the screen. With essentially no exceptions, most people construct and elaborate narrative about the goals and interactions of the geometric shapes: One is a villain, one a protector, the third a victim who grows courageous and saves the dayall these mental states and narratives just from looking at geometric shapes moving about. In the psychological literature, this is called an impoverished stimulus.

Our interactions with people using the road are an example of an impoverished stimulus, too. We only see a pedestrian for a few hundred milliseconds before we have to decide how to react to them. We see a car edging slightly into a lane for a half second and have to decide whether to yield to them. We catch a fleeting glimpse of a cyclist and judge whether they know were making a right turn. These kinds of interactions are constant, and they are at the very core of driving safely and considerately.

And computers, so far, are hopeless at navigating them.

The perils of lacking an intuition for state of mind are already evident. In the first at-fault crash of a self-driving vehicle, a Google self-driving car in Mountain View incorrectly assumed that a bus driver would yield to it, misunderstanding both the urgency and the flexibility of a human driver trying to get around a stopped vehicle. In another crash, a self-driving Uber in Arizona was hit by a turning driver who expected that any oncoming vehicles would notice the adjacent lanes of traffic had slowed down and adjust its expectations of how turning drivers would behave.

Why are computers so bad at this task of mind reading if its so easy for people? This circumstance comes up so often in AI development that it has a name: Moravecs Paradox. The tasks that are easiest for people are often the ones that are the hardest for computers. Were least aware of what our minds do best, said the late AI pioneer Marvin Minsky. Were more aware of simple processes that dont work well than of complex ones that work flawlessly.

So how do you design an algorithm to perform a task if you cant say with any certainty what the task entails?

The usual solution is to define the task as simply as possible and use what are called deep-learning algorithms that can learn from vast quantities of data. For example, when given a sufficient number of pictures of trees (and pictures of things that are not trees), these computer programs can do a very good job of identifying a tree. If you boil a problem down to either proving or disproving an unambiguous fact about the worldthere is a tree there, or there is notalgorithms can do a pretty good job.

The only way to solve these problems is to deeply understand human behavior by characterizing it carefully using the techniques of behavioral science.But what to do about problems where basic facts about the world are neither simple nor accessible? Humans can make surprisingly accurate judgments about other humans because we have an immensely sophisticated set of internal models for how those around us behave. But those models are hidden from scrutiny, hidden in the black boxes of our minds. How do you label images with the contents of somebodys constantly fluid and mostly nonsensical inner monologue?

The only way to solve these problems is to deeply understand human behaviornot just by reverse-engineering it, but by characterizing it carefully and comprehensively using the techniques of behavioral science. Humans are immensely capable but have opaque internal mechanisms. We need to use the techniques of human behavioral research in order to build computer-vision models that are trained to capture the nuances and subtleties of human responses to the world instead of trying to guess what our internal model of the world looks like.

First, we need to work out how humans worksecond comes training the machines. Only with a rich, deep characterization of the quirks and foibles of human ability can we know enough about the problem were trying to solve in order to build computer models that can solve it. By using humans as the model for ideal performance, we are able to gain traction on these difficult tasks and find a meaningful solution to this intuition problem.

And we need to solve it. If self-driving cars are going to achieve their promise as a revolution in urban transportationdelivering reduced emissions, better mobility, and safer streetsthey will have to exist on a level playing field with the humans who already use those roads. They will have to be good citizens, not only skilled at avoiding at-fault accidents, but able to drive in such a way that their behavior is expected, comprehensible, and clear to other vehicles drivers and the pedestrians and cyclists sharing space with them.

Follow Sam on Twitter. Learn how to write for Quartz Ideas. We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

Original post:
Self-driving cars still can't mimic the most natural human behavior - Quartz